A new document has recently come to light about the potential future of the Xbox 720, and if even half of it actually comes to pass, the way we think of gaming is about to be fundamentally changed, and sooner than we may expect.

The document, a hefty fifty six page affair, spells out some very impressive points about what should be expected with this one, and perhaps the biggest point of all: pricing and release dates. According to the document, which has since been slapped with some legal action on Microsoft's part, we can expect the next Xbox to show up sometime in 2013, and will sell for $299. It will come with support for Blu-ray, 3D, concurrent apps, and an impressive hardware loadout including either six or eight ARM or x86 cores running at two GHz each.

That by itself is unexpected; some earlier projections had put the new Xbox version to hit sometime in 2015, and seeing a console launch at $299, after seeing many consoles launch at $500, is a definite surprise. The hardware, meanwhile, is an eyebrow-raiser to say the least, and may well represent a real game-changer in terms of home entertainment, especially given all the recent changes in Xbox Live and its only ancillary relationship to video games.

But that's not all; the document also detailed some modifications to Kinect, including a new version that offers a lot more than the previous did, and a special pair of glasses geared for the Kinect. But the so-called Kinect Glasses, said to be similar to Google Glass and offering an augmented reality experience for Kinect, won't be launching with the new Xbox, but rather making its appearance in 2014.

Of course, there's no way to know whether the Kinect 2, as it's being called, the Kinect Glasses, and the Xbox 720--if it's even called the Xbox 720--will actually come out when the report suggests it will. But this is likely to be pretty impressive when it does finally emerge.

A new document has recently come to light about the potential future of the Xbox 720, and if even half of it actually comes to pass, the way we think of gaming is about to be fundamentally changed, and sooner than we may expect.

The document, a hefty fifty six page affair, spells out some very impressive points about what should be expected with this one, and perhaps the biggest point of all: pricing and release dates. According to the document, which has since been slapped with some legal action on Microsoft's part, we can expect the next Xbox to show up sometime in 2013, and will sell for \$299. It will come with support for Blu-ray, 3D, concurrent apps, and an impressive hardware loadout including either six or eight ARM or x86 cores running at two GHz each.

That by itself is unexpected; some earlier projections had put the new Xbox version to hit sometime in 2015, and seeing a console launch at \$299, after seeing many consoles launch at \$500, is a definite surprise. The hardware, meanwhile, is an eyebrow-raiser to say the least, and may well represent a real game-changer in terms of home entertainment, especially given all the recent changes in Xbox Live and its only ancillary relationship to video games.

But that's not all; the document also detailed some modifications to Kinect, including a new version that offers a lot more than the previous did, and a special pair of glasses geared for the Kinect. But the so-called Kinect Glasses, said to be similar to Google Glass and offering an augmented reality experience for Kinect, won't be launching with the new Xbox, but rather making its appearance in 2014.

Of course, there's no way to know whether the Kinect 2, as it's being called, the Kinect Glasses, and the Xbox 720--if it's even called the Xbox 720--will actually come out when the report suggests it will. But this is likely to be pretty impressive when it does finally emerge.\n